by Peter Clines
“I tried to call you last night,” said Eddie.
Eddie was the worst sort of employer. He thought he was a generous, fair man with a firm grasp of business. He was actually a tightwad middle-manager with few good ideas who micromanaged everyone. Nate had worked in the office for two weeks when he was given a long speech about how he wasn’t applying himself and meeting expected quotas. He’d countered with some very simple math and shown how Eddie’s expectations were impossible for anyone to achieve. His boss had stood there, staring at him, and then wandered away. Three days later, he’d come back to moan about how he’d expected the whole project to be done the week before.
There was a shuffle of chairs as Zack and Anne leaned out to see if they were Eddie’s chosen focus today. Once they realized his gaze was on Nate, they slipped back into their own cubicles.
“Sorry,” said Nate. “What’s up?”
“Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
“It never rang.”
“I called three times,” said Eddie.
Nate felt a moment of relief and annoyance at the same time. If something was important enough to call three times on a Wednesday night, Eddie would’ve been down in Nate’s cubicle first thing Thursday morning, not late in the afternoon. He’d called for something petty, been annoyed he couldn’t get through, and only remembered his annoyance after lunch.
“I guess I was in a dead spot,” said Nate. He focused on the new bundle of return slips and peeled off the rubber band.
“We’re in the middle of Los Angeles and you’re trying to tell me you couldn’t get a cell phone signal?
“I bet it’s my new place,” said Nate after a moment’s thought. He shrugged. “The walls are all brick and plaster. I think it doubles as a bomb shelter. When war breaks out, you can all hide out at my place.”
He heard a quick snort of laughter from Anne’s cubicle. She was the one bright spot in the office. She was another temp like him, with the cheekbones, eyes, and body of a model. Her hair stretched down to her waist. Anne had been at the office for eight months now.
Eddie huffed out more air to make sure Nate knew how inconvenient this was. “Make sure they get your new phone number upstairs,” he said.
“As soon as I have one,” said Nate.
The oversized man wandered back into the hall without ever saying what he’d called for. Nate looked back at his screen. At least the day wasn’t ending on a down note.
* * *
Nate could get to work faster from his new place, but Sean had been proven right. He’d cut fifteen minutes off his travel time, but spent twenty minutes every night looking for parking when he got home. Instead of making his job more bearable, it added to the frustration he felt. He usually ended up parking almost a block and a half away.
As he walked down the hill toward his apartment, he spotted a young woman with bright blue hair leaving the building. He’d already identified a few of his neighbors. He’d seen Oskar twice, both times out on the sidewalk. The old man did most of his shopping at the two markets at the end of the street. There was also a curvy woman and a ginger-headed man close to Nate’s age who walked with the practiced synchronization of a long-time couple. None of them seemed to notice him. There’d been no more sightings of the farmer’s daughter blonde who lived across the hall.
He slipped through the gate and tried to find the security door key on his keyring as he walked up the steps. Something flashed sunlight in his eyes and he glanced to his left. From this angle, he could see between some of the shrubbery and the bottom of the building. At the far corner was an old fashioned cornerstone of glossy rock.
Nate stepped down the stairs and onto the small lawn. He could see the lines where rows of sod had been laid out. A few steps carried him to the corner of the building. A large shrub grew there. He bent a few branches out of the way until the symbols there were revealed.
The cornerstone was a solid block of marble, shot through with dark veins and a few flecks of sparkling stone. The numbers and letters were carved almost half an inch deep.
Nate wasn’t sure how much information was supposed to be on a cornerstone, but he felt let down by how little was on this one.
A few minutes later he was upstairs and tossing his bag onto the couch. He usually changed into casual clothes after work, but he had nothing clean. In fact, he’d brought a half-full hamper of dirty clothes from his old apartment.
Thursday night, it seemed, would be centered around checking out the building’s laundry room. Clothes and quarters were gathered, a bottle of detergent was stuffed in the top of the hamper, and he lugged the whole thing down the back stairwell to the basement.
There were eight machines in the laundry room. Four washers stood in a line against the concrete wall opposite the door. The dryers were set in two stacks of two. Opposite the dryers was a battered couch with a man sprawled on it.
The man had his hands up covering his eyes, more in a gesture of mild frustration than any sort of protection. His solid arms and broad chest were the kind that came from constant labor, not days at the gym. He wasn’t much taller than Nate. An inch or two at the most. Nate was aware, though, of the difference between being five-ten and being six feet tall. It was far more than just two inches.
As Nate shuffled in with his hamper, the man lowered his hands and revealed at least two days’ worth of stubble. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” echoed Nate. “Long day?”
“They’re all long,” he sighed with a grin. “Forgot to do laundry over the weekend. Now I need shirts and socks and I’ve got an early call tomorrow.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. Don’t use the washer on the left. Never spins fast enough so everything comes out wet. Really wet, not damp.”
“Thanks,” said Nate.
“No worries. You new?”
“Yeah. Just moved into twenty-eight last weekend.”
“Right,” said the man. “Saw your pickup with the desk and the shelves and stuff.”
“Friend’s pickup, but yeah.”
“Yeah,” he said. He pointed up at the edge where the wall and ceiling joined. “Roger. I live right there. Number seven.”
“I’m Nate. You been here long?”
“Little over a year.” The dryer chimed and went silent. Roger dragged himself off the couch and slouched to the machine with his olive-drab pillow. It unfolded into a tall rucksack.
Nate flicked his eyes to the building above them. “You like it?”
“What’s not to like?” He shrugged as he shoved laundry into his bag. “Work a sixty-five, seventy hour week. Weekends I run errands or go out. This is where I sleep and keep my stuff. And it’s cheap.”
“Seventy hour work week?”
“Local Eighty, bro,” Roger said. “Grip.”
“Like in the movies?”
“Yep. Seven years.”
Nate grinned. “What the hell does a grip do anyway?”
“Grips are the hammers, man. Set flags, build platforms, keep everything safe.”
“Flags?”
Roger smiled. “Think of it this way. Electricians are in charge of the lights. We’re in charge of the shadows.” He tossed a few last t-shirts in the sack. “Have a good night, bro.”
“You too.”
Roger clomped up the stairs and Nate was alone in the laundry room. He packed the last of his clothes into the washer and fished two quarters out of his jeans. Fifty cents for a load of laundry was almost as surreal as his rent. Water hissed inside the machine.
He wandered back into the hall. Right across from the laundry room doorway was a door. It was rust-red with long, inset panels, not the flat faces the apartment doors had. A hasp had been screwed into the door frame, just above the knob, and a gleaming Masterlock hung from it.
He strolled down the hall. A bare bulb threw harsh light everywhere. The floor was painted the same blue as the laundry room, but just past the bulb the paint ended and it was bare
concrete.
Behind the laundry room was a smaller room, maybe the size of his studio, filled with water heaters. They were squat, can-like things that reached his hip, not so much arranged in the room as shoved into it. Most of them were bone-colored, although two chalk-white ones stood against the far wall. Nate could see ENERGY EFFICIENT stickers on several of them. A faint haze of warm steam hung in the air.
He heard a rustling noise. A cockroach with a body as long as his ring finger scurried up onto one of the heaters. It was a bright green roachasaurus, the granddaddy of the one he’d seen in his apartment that first day. Its tiny claws pinged and scraped on the metal surface. It was always wrong when the pests got so big you could hear them walking.
A mental image rose up in his mind. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, standing in a misty room of alien eggs.
Nate stepped away from the cluster of heaters.
The hall ended at a set of double doors. He looked behind him and guessed he was close to the front of the building. The elevator shaft was probably right on the other side of the doors.
Like the door across from the laundry room, these didn’t match the rest of the building. These were elegant doors. The kind of doors that used to lead into ballrooms or penthouse suites in old hotels.
They had a bar across them, the way Bugs Bunny would block a door. The dusty wood just looked like a perfectly-straight two-by-four. A length of chain looped around the bar three or four times and also threaded itself twice through the door handles.
Nate stepped out of the light and peered at the padlock that held the ends of the chain. It was a huge, solid-looking block with a loop almost as thick as his finger. Lock and chain were both covered with bright orange rust, faded to dirt-brown in places. He could see a few flecks of steel gleaming through here and there. If he had to guess, he’d say no one had opened the lock in at least twenty years.
He set his finger against the left-hand door. It was warm. Warmer than the air in the hall. He gave a little push. Between the bar and the chains, the doors were locked solid. It was like pushing on the wall.
Back down the hall he heard his washer spin into high gear. This concludes our exploration of the cellar, he thought to himself.
Six
Saturday was a full week in his new home. Nate wanted to mark the day and remembered the sun deck on the roof. Sitting out with a beer sounded like a great way to end his first week and start the weekend.
He headed down to the stairwell and followed it up the extra flight to the roof. There was a metal fire door with a crash bar on it. Posted on the wall next to the door was a list of rules for using the sun deck which seemed to amount to don’t be a dick about it. A note was stuck to the metal door with a blue X, one of the magnetic letters kids used on the fridge.
XELA IS HERE
Nate wondered what it meant. He hit the bar and sunlight flooded the stairwell. He stepped out and let the door swing shut behind him.
A huge block of bricks dominated the front half of the roof. Nate guessed it was maybe ten feet high and even longer on the side flanking the stairwell. It was as if the architect had built one apartment for another floor and then given up. There was a weather-beaten door next to the stairs. There was no knob, but it had three half-rusted padlocks on it.
The back half of the roof was a wooden deck that looked like it should’ve been on a ski lodge or a Malibu beach house. It was twenty-five feet on each side and stood two feet above the tar-paper roof on short, squat legs. The planks were faded and dry, but not enough to seem dangerous.
Three wide steps led him up onto the platform. He could see downtown, the Hollywood sign, the observatory, and more. The whole city stretched around him in a vibrant panorama. It was one of those views that reminded him Los Angeles was a lot more than traffic, concrete, and graffiti.
Half a dozen deck chairs were scattered around the deck, facing all directions. On the back corner was a large mesh cabana, the kind people kept in back yards. Near the center sat a squat piece of metal. After a moment Nate realized it was a fire pit. He’d seen setups like this in movies and commercials. It was tough accepting this was his place now. He took a hit off his beer and let it soak in.
“You’re the new guy, right?”
Lying on a chair he’d walked past was the woman with neon blue hair, the one he’d glimpsed before. Up close, he guessed she was a couple years younger than him. She had on a set of wayfarer sunglasses. And nothing else.
Nate’s eyes flitted past her to gaze back at the fire door. “Yeah,” he said. “Just moved in last weekend.”
He saw her nod in his peripheral vision. “In twenty-eight, right? Far corner?”
“I guess so, yeah.” He shifted his gaze from the fire door to the oversized brick structure. It didn’t have any windows he could see. Just the padlocked door.
Another half-seen nod from the woman. “I’m in twenty-one. Opposite corner.”
“Ahhh.” He took another drink and focused on the distant observatory.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “They’re just tits. You’ve seen tits before in your life, right?”
Nate made a point of looking her in the eyes. He hoped it came across a lot more casual than it felt. “Twice now,” he said. “Three times if you count the internet.”
She grinned. “Xela.”
“What’s that mean? I saw it on the sign.”
“It’s my name. Xela.” She pronounced it so it rhymed with Leela. She held out her hand.
“Nate.” He shook the hand. She had a solid grip.
Xela wasn’t naked, he realized, just topless. Her bikini bottoms didn’t hide much, though. Her body was lean, and her arms and shoulders had three or four tattoos each, or maybe one elaborate one. He didn’t want to let his eyes drift down far enough to check. Her sky-colored hair dusted her shoulders. She’d gone the extra step and dyed her eyebrows, too.
“You all moved in already?”
“Yeah. I didn’t have much stuff. Finished unpacking a couple days ago.”
“You like it so far?”
He glanced out at the city. “Well, it’s got a great view.” He winced as soon as the words left his lips and tried to drown them with the bottle.
“Pathetic,” she sighed. She grabbed a shirt from a pile at the foot of the deck chair and shrugged it over her shoulders. “You can look now,” she said as she threaded a pair of buttons. “The awful things are hidden from your sensitive eyes.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just an odd way to meet the neighbors.”
“That’s why there’s a sign up on the door.”
“Yeah, but when I saw it, I thought ‘Xela is here’ might have something to do with Scientology.”
“Ouch.”
“Nothing personal.”
“No, you’re right. Most folks in the building know what it means and just leave me alone out here.”
He glanced back at the door. “Sorry. Did you want privacy?”
“If I cared about privacy, Nate, would I sunbathe nude on the roof of my building? It’s just a body. What’s the point getting worked up over it?”
“Fair enough.”
“I mean, if it makes you feel better I’m picturing you naked right now. Giving you the benefit of the doubt in a few places, too. Step towards me and to the left.”
“What?”
“One step forward. Maybe a foot and a half left.”
He moved and his shadow fell across her face. She smiled and pushed the sunglasses onto the top of her head. Her eyes were bright blue, too. She tapped his leg with her foot. “Thanks. That’s better.” She took a good look at him. “So, what do you do, Nate?”
“Do?”
“For a living. For fun. To make life interesting.”
He shrugged. “I work in an office.”
Xela’s face fell. “I’m so sorry for you.”
He took another hit off his beer. “Why say that? Maybe I love my job.”
“Do you?”
“Nobody sane loves working in an office,” she said. “It’s against human nature to be locked up in a cubicle all day long.”
“Who said anything about a cubicle?”
She grinned. It was a tight, thin smile. “If you had a big office, you’d’ve lied and said you loved your job.”
He shrugged again and finished off the beer. “Maybe if I had a big office I really would love my job.”
Xela shook her head. “You’re not that messed up.”
“How do you know? You just met me.”
“You’re uncomfortable seeing your hot neighbor topless even though I told you I was okay with it. If you were messed up, you’d’ve just stared.”
“I wanted to stare,” he told her. “I just thought it would make things awkward in the laundry room later.”
“Not really. I do my laundry nude, too. That way I can clean everything at once.”
“Really?”
“No, of course not. That’d be weird.”
He sat down on one of the other chairs. She knocked her sunglasses back down over her eyes as he set the empty bottle down on the deck. “So what do you do, Xela? Aside from making the new guy uncomfortable?”
“Guess.”
“Why?”
“Because I like to see what people say.”
He looked at her hair and the tattoos peeking out of her shirt around her neck. The collar was short with little points, and he realized it was an old, plain-front tuxedo shirt. She’d only done two buttons because that’s all there were. The rest of them were button holes for studs. And the shirt was dotted with pinpricks of color.
“I’m going to go with artist,” he said.
“Very good. What gave me away?”
“You’ve got paint on your shirt. A lot on the sleeves.”
“You’re amazing, my dear Sherlock,” she said. “Most guys just see the hair and the tits and go for stripper, although I think you would’ve been one of the classy ones who said ‘exotic dancer’.”
“Glad to know I measure up. So you’re a painter?”